NVIDIA Announces Record Q3 FY 2017 Results

Nvidia has announced its fiscal earnings for the third quarter of its 2017 fiscal year (I don't get it either, but apparently that's the year Nvidia is in).

The graphics card maker managed to hit $2 billion in quarterly revenue, with earnings of $2.004 billion this quarter. This is up 54 per cent year-on-year, and follows a previous record growth in the second quarter. Nvidia is forecasting revenue for the next quarter of $2.1 billion, plus or minus two per cent. This projection would see the company drastically surpass its best yearly earnings – $5.01 billion announced in January 2016 – as Nvidia is on course to make close to $7 billion for the year.

The boom in Nvidia's margin is especially impressive when considering that the core PC market is in such a steep decline.

Gross margin for this quarter was up 2.7 per cent year-on-year to 59.0 per cent, and operating income was up 161 per cent to $639 million. Net income for the quarter was $542 million, up 120 per cent over last year, and earnings per share came in at $0.83, up 89 per cent year-on-year.

Nvidia has done well to diversify itself, but its market is mostly based on consumer GPU sales. The launch of Pascal and the GeForce GTX 10 Series has seen the company maintain both a healthy performance lead over its competition along with a lead in sales.

Gaming related sales for this quarter came in at $1.244 billion, up 63.5 per cent year-on-year. To put that into perspective, Nvidia's gaming business earned more in this quarter than all of AMD's Computing and Graphics segment earned in its last quarter.

Outside of gaming, Nvidia has aggresively pursued the datacentre market, and is starting to make inroads there. In the last quarter, Nvidia's Datacenter group had revenue of $240 million, up from $82 million a year ago – a 193 per cent increase in revenue year-on-year. This is now the second largest segment for Nvidia.

Elsewhere, Automotive continues to be a solid performer and Nvidia has seen strong growth here. Revenue for this quarter was $127 million, up from $79 million a year ago – up 60 per cent.

OEM and IP had earnings of $186 million for the quarter, down slightly from the $193 million it earned a year ago. The recent announcement that Nvidia will power the Nintendo Switch however will lead to growth in this area going forward.

This has been an overwhelmingly positive period for Nvidia and the company shows no signs of slowing down.